Author : Carolyn Elaine Burnside McCormick
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781321363319
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (633 download)
Book Synopsis Reward Responses in Autism Spectrum Disorder by : Carolyn Elaine Burnside McCormick
Download or read book Reward Responses in Autism Spectrum Disorder written by Carolyn Elaine Burnside McCormick and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) appear to find social stimuli less salient and motivating than their typically developing peers (Dawson et al., 2004; Dawson, Webb, & McPartland, 2005; Mundy, 2003; Schultz, 2005). The goal of this dissertation was to examine reward saliency, motivation, and learning across multiple eye-tracking tasks. Questions about visual attention, visual search, and rule learning were also addressed. A sample of young children with ASD who received minimal intervention and a group of typically developing controls matched on chronological age participated in three different eye-tracking tasks: a free viewing paradigm with still images, a visual search task, and a visuospatial rule learning task. In addition two groups of children with ASD who had received two years of intensive intervention (the Early Start Denver Model or alternative intervention) and typically developing age matched controls participated in the visuospatial task. Children with ASD demonstrated differences in visual attention to social and nonsocial stimuli, particularly when those stimuli were presented dynamically. Despite this evidence for a difference in the salience of social and nonsocial stimuli in the group with ASD, all groups tested with the visuospatial task demonstrated faster performance when rewarded with social stimuli. Children with ASD who received minimal intervention or the alternative intervention demonstrated worse performance than their typically developing peers. Children who had received the Early Start Denver Model intervention demonstrated similar performance to their typically developing peers. Results suggest that children with ASD find social stimuli motivating, and this motivation may be put to advantage in treatment programs that use social routines as teaching contexts.